Polypharmacy among Older Individuals with COPD: Trends between 2000 and 2015 in Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and concomitant diseases requires several medications. Yet there is little data on how the pharmacological burden progressed over time among older individuals with COPD. We aimed to: 1) describe the proportion of older adults with COPD in Quebec, Canada, that were exposed to polypharmacy (≥10, ≥15 or ≥20 medications/year) between 2000 and 2015; 2) calculate the proportion of individuals receiving specific prescriptions for COPD during this period. We conducted a population-based cohort study with the Quebec Integrated Chronic Disease Surveillance System. Individuals aged ≥66 years with COPD and covered by the universal public drug plan were included. We calculated the total number of drugs used at least once by each individual during each of the studied years, and used age-standardized proportions to compare proportions of users between the years. The average number of drugs used increased from 12.0 in 2000 to 14.8 in 2015. The proportion of individuals exposed to polypharmacy increased (≥10 drugs: 62.0% to 74.6%;≥15 drugs: 31.2% to 45.4%; ≥20 drugs: 12.3% to 22.4%). The proportion of individuals receiving long-acting bronchodilators increased from 18.7% in 2000 to 69.6% in 2015. The use of short-acting bronchodilators decreased from 81.5% to 67.9%, and that of inhaled corticosteroids from 60.6% to 26.0%. The proportion of users of methylxanthines decreased from 15.0% to 1.9%. Older individuals with COPD are increasingly exposed to polypharmacy. Identifying which polypharmacy is beneficial is a priority.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".